This is White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs whining about “analogies” and “references” and “stunning” protest signs during the health care debate:
Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.
Either some amnesia virus is running rampant in the White House or the entire Obama staff is already addicted to the usage of the Memory Hole.
What some smart Iranians say about the Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Hopeychangey:
The [Obama] administration has avoided discussion about the prospects for liberalization in a country [Iran] that exports radical Islamist ideology throughout the Middle East and beyond. In regressive realpolitik fashion, it has grown increasingly reticent about the Iranian people’s struggle for human rights, apparently viewing it as irrelevant to U.S security interests. Rather than bolstering the opposition at a time when the Iranian regime is at its weakest, America is pursuing a policy of appeasement.
[...]
Many Iran experts have warned that displays of Western solidarity could taint Iran’s democrats. Nonsense. Iranian cyberspace is brimming with anger at what the Green Movement sees as betrayal by the West.
[...]
President Ahmadinejad boasts on state media about his breakthrough achievement—getting respect and deference from the U.S.—while he proceeds to reject already watered-down nuclear proposals.
Can the Obama administration achieve anything with Ahmadinejad’s cabal on the nuclear front that could possibly justify its betrayal of the Iranian people and American values? We think not. And we believe the administration still has time to change course and not lose the faith of a people longing to join the Free World.
After analysing the “New Liberalism” of Obama and his ilk which wants America to “decline”, ie to end its role as the world’s hegemon, Monsieur Krauthammer explains why such a development threatens chaos and that it would be the result of an active choice that can and should be resisted in the following way:
Decline is a choice. More than a choice, a temptation. How to resist it?
First, accept our role as hegemon. And reject those who deny its essential benignity. There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance–as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom.
And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen.
So, resistance to decline begins with moral self-confidence and will. But maintaining dominance is a matter not just of will but of wallet. We are not inherently in economic decline. We have the most dynamic, innovative, technologically advanced economy in the world. We enjoy the highest productivity. It is true that in the natural and often painful global division of labor wrought by globalization, less skilled endeavors like factory work migrate abroad, but America more than compensates by pioneering the newer technologies and industries of the information age.
There are, of course, major threats to the American economy. But there is nothing inevitable and inexorable about them. Take, for example, the threat to the dollar (as the world’s reserve currency) that comes from our massive trade deficits. Here again, the China threat is vastly exaggerated. In fact, fully two-thirds of our trade imbalance comes from imported oil. This is not a fixed fact of life. We have a choice. We have it in our power, for example, to reverse the absurd de facto 30-year ban on new nuclear power plants. We have it in our power to release huge domestic petroleum reserves by dropping the ban on offshore and Arctic drilling. We have it in our power to institute a serious gasoline tax (refunded immediately through a payroll tax reduction) to curb consumption and induce conservation.
Nothing is written. Nothing is predetermined. We can reverse the slide, we can undo dependence if we will it.
The other looming threat to our economy–and to the dollar–comes from our fiscal deficits. They are not out of our control. There is no reason we should be structurally perpetuating the massive deficits incurred as temporary crisis measures during the financial panic of 2008. A crisis is a terrible thing to exploit when it is taken by the New Liberalism as a mandate for massive expansion of the state and of national debt–threatening the dollar, the entire economy, and consequently our superpower status abroad.
There are things to be done. Resist retreat as a matter of strategy and principle. And provide the means to continue our dominant role in the world by keeping our economic house in order. And finally, we can follow the advice of Demosthenes when asked what was to be done about the decline of Athens. His reply? “I will give what I believe is the fairest and truest answer: Don’t do what you are doing now.”
I don’t know about you – and I doubt Monsieur Krauthammer himself intended it so – but the French Cowboy can read “Palin 2012″ between every line of this text.
The French Cowboy is not impressed by Obama’s having received the Nobel Prize for peace. For one thing, if the people on that committee had half a brain they wouldn’t have given it to a person whose policies don’t promote peace, but the reign of terror (think the Obama administration’s one-sided concessions towards Iran, Burma, China, Russia, etc) and for the other, the prize has been given to undeserving individuals before, so you can ask yourself how much of an honour it is to be in such company. The addition of Obama isn’t going to elevate the average, though.
So what does the prize mean for Afghanistan? If anything, then it will embolden Obama to make the wrong decision and to send too few troops there. Imagine what this prize must do to Obama’s already inflated ego. He must feel confirmed in all his wrong notions. Bon travail, Nobel committee.
Oh, why couldn’t Obama just become the UN’s general secretary? That would have been a job much more suitable for him than his current one and doomsday would be still a couple of years further in the future.
And here are the top 10 reasons why Chicago didn’t get the Olympics:
10. Dead people can’t vote at IOC meetings
9. Obama distracted by 25 min meeting with Gen. McChrystal
8. Who cares if Obama couldn’t talk the IOC into Chicago? He’ll be able to talk Iran out of nukes.
7. The impediment is Israel still building settlements.
6. Obviously no president would have been able to acomplish it.
5. We’ve been quite clear and said all along that we didn’t want the Olympics.
4. This isn’t about the number of Olympics “lost”, it’s about the number of Olympics “saved” or “created”.
3. Clearly not enough wise Latina judges on the committee
2. Because the IOC is racist.
1. It’s George Bush’s fault.
WH: We Exposed Myths of McChrystal’s Assessment – French Cowboy Unsure Whether to Laugh Or Cry
What’s wrong with this picture:
But White House officials are resisting McChrystal’s call for urgency, which he underscored Thursday during a speech in London, and questioning important elements of his assessment, which calls for a vast expansion of an increasingly unpopular war. One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting, said, “A lot of assumptions — and I don’t want to say myths, but a lot of assumptions — were exposed to the light of day.”
[...]
Senior White House officials asked some of the sharpest questions, according to participants and others who have been briefed on the meeting, while the uniformed military, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, did not take issue with McChrystal’s assessment.
According to White House officials involved in the meeting, Vice President Biden offered some of the more pointed challenges to McChrystal, who attended the session by video link from Kabul. One official said Biden played the role of “skeptic in chief,” while other top officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, were muted in their comments.
So let’s see, on the one side you have General McChrystal and General Petraeus, on the other you have “senior White House officials” including Joe Biden. Whose assessment would you rely on when making decisions on the Afghan war?
In a better world, McChrystal would resign. But in a better world, he wouldn’t be in the situation in which he is in the first place. It’s too obvious already that Obama put him into his position only to get nice headlines, then wriggle out of what is his plain and clear responsibility as the Commander-in-Chief, ie doing what is best to win the war. Instead Obama sends his underlings (aka “senior White House officials”) to make “pointed challenges” against the General’s assessment so that he can hide himself behind his Vice President’s anti-Chrystal clear grasp of the situation when he starves the efforts of the military in the hopes of saving a few bucks to make his disastrous deficits look a little less disastrous.
“Assumptions” – not to call them myths! – were “exposed”! Really? Gosh, aren’t we lucky we got “senior White House officials” to expose the “assumptions” of people like McChrystal and Petraeus? Imagine we didn’t have “senior White House officials” to check those crazy military guys! We’d be in danger of actually winning the war and – what’s probably even worse – of making conservatives happy – let alone the (ever decreasing) rest of the nation that wasn’t marinated in anti-American self-loathing!
The French Cowboy thinks that everybody would understand should McChrystal decide to resign. But I also have a hunch that he takes his responsibility too serious to step down unless the situation with the Obama administration has become absolutely hopeless. The men and women in the battlefield don’t have the luxury of resigning their posts because their Commander-in-Chief isn’t decided on which team he’s in either. McChrystal wouldn’t want to let them down, nor the rest of the nation for which a defeat in Afghanistan might be more costly than it’s currently aware of.
I can’t help but have the impression that Obama is trading in victory in the wars and at least somewhat sustainable deficits for his narcissistic ‘Transform America until it’s unrecognisable’ plans that will leave not only America but indeed the entire planet in worse shape. Who is to gain when the President of the United States weakens his own country from the inside and babbles nonsense like “[n]o one nation can or should try to dominate another nation” as if he were an 8-year old playing ‘UN meeting’ with stuffed animals not the US President giving a speech while thugs from Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Burma etc are snickering over their bright future? Not the tortured prisoners in Cuba and China or the starving masses in North Korea, that much is clear.
Mark Helprin on Obama’s decision to cancel the planned European missile defence system:
What we have here is an inadvertent homage to Lewis Carroll: We are going to cancel a defense that takes five years to mount, because the threat will not materialize for five years. And we will not deploy land-based interceptors in Europe, because our new plan is to deploy land-based interceptors in Europe.
This is a headline from the Washington Times:
Obama, Ban Ki-moon warn world about warming
Rarely does the French Cowboy venture to make predictions. But President Obama’s decision making concerning mostly, but not exclusively, foreign policy has taken on a very simple and clear pattern from which it is not hard to extrapolate what future decisions will be made and be very likely correct. The pattern is that, when A is the good idea and B is the bad idea, Obama goes for B. Here are some examples:
A: Tell Russia to back off its sovereign, democratic neighbour states after it invaded Georgia.
B: Tell both sides to “show restraint”.
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A: Unambiguously side with the pro-democratic Iranian protesters after the rigged ‘election’ of Ahjmadinejad.
B: Signal that the President of the United States of America is perfectly indifferent about how illegitimate and brutal the official leader of Iran is as long as he can have faint hopes of building a diplomatic relation with him.
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A: Stand with the Honduran people against power-hungry Chávez-alley and former president Zelaya who was ousted in accordance with the constitution after an illegal attempt to extend his time in office.
B: Intimidate and sanction Honduras, demand it reinstates Zelaya, just as Chávez does.
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A: Build that missile defence system in Eastern Europe to shield US troops and friendly nations from Iranian attacks.
B: Scrap the defence system and give Putin an enormous victory for nothing in return. Tell the Poles on the anniversary of the Soviet Invasion.
As you can see, Obama has consistently picked option B, the bad idea. Now here comes my prediction: Obama won’t send enough troops to Afghanistan. I admit this is not much of a prediction because already the signs from the White House are all pointing into that direction. Obama’s national security adviser Jones reportedly said that the Commander-in-Chief will have a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” moment should more troops be demanded by General McChrystal. And now that McChrystal’s assessment of the situation in Afghanistan is complete, he still didn’t get the permission to openly say how many troops he thinks he needs to put his strategy into practice. Meanwhile, the President declares himself ‘skeptical‘ about the idea of sending more troops to Afghanistan and says, “[...] right now, the question is—the first question is, are we doing the right thing? Are we pursuing the right strategy?”
If eight months into his presidency, and after several official assessments by his advisers and generals on a war that has been going on for eight years, the commander-in-chief says he still needs to decide whether the current strategy is the right one and, if not, which one would be, and only then begin to ponder on the number of troops that should be made available for the effort, then be afraid. Be very afraid.
Usually, the people working in the mainstream media like to make their trade the main topic of the news cycle. So a cynic might ask why they don’t seize the opportunity now to print headlines like ‘Communist Green Jobs Czar Hired And Fired By WH – MSM Notices After The Fact’ or to run TV specials entitled ‘Obamaboozled – How the most transparent administration ever managed to keep a communist truther czar a secret from professional journalists’. But that question would only be asked, of course, to highlight how embarrassingly biased and unreliable the mainstream media has become.
There’s a lot to learn from the Van Jones story. Primo, with a love-sick media, this White House can, and actually did, take advantage of the fact that ‘czars’ don’t have to be vetted by Congress and give a lot of power to a lot of people who would never have passed the public test. So, somebody should better take a look at the other aristocrats in the White House. Secundo, Obama’s social network has followed him into the White House. Elsewhere the French Cowboy wrote that “it is not really a surprise that Jeremiah Wright won’t be Secretary of State and William Ayers Secretary of Homeland Security.” And indeed it isn’t. Those two characters have been weighed by the American people and found wanting. As for Van Jones, while he is a different Name and a different face, he represents the same kind of anti-American views that do Ayers and Wright. Perfect for Obama’s Russian cabinet. Tertio, the mainstream media are cherry-picking their news stories and do so as if they were paid by the White House. It is beyond parody how news outlets have been mute on Jones while conservative bloggers and the healthily paranoid Glenn Beck digged out enough controversial information on Jones to fire three czars. And now that Jones had to leave, the common story is ‘he said unfriendly things about Republicans’. Hah! If that were the standard the White House would be empty except maybe for Obama’s dog. (And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think any Republicans would pass that test either.)
Personally, the French Cowboy finds Jones curiously sympathetic. His political views are on the polar opposite to mine, all right. But, contrary to certain others of Obama’s acquaintances, he neither tried to kill anyone, nor does he claim to be a man of God. And in comparison to Obama himself, Jones seems to have a lot more spine and spunk. Besides, he’s more photogenic and that has never really hurt a public figure. In that sense we’re lucky that Jones didn’t become the president. He might have succeeded better at “transforming America” into the land of the red-taped and the home of the nanny-state-pampered. For Jones, there’s hope for change outside of the Obama administration.
